Doctor
Jackson and Horace Wells also presented their claims to the committee and
were respectfully considered.
The report of this committee is a valuable document,--a study for young
lawyers in the sifting of evidence,--and of itself a severe criticism on
the judgment of the French Academy, which it considered at too great a
distance to judge fairly of the circumstances attending the advent of
painless surgery. The committee decided unanimously that Doctor Wells did
not carry his experiments far enough to reach a decided result; that
Doctor Jackson's testimony was contradictory and not much to be depended
on; and that the credit of discovering painless surgery properly
appertained to Dr. W. T. G. Morton. They recommended an appropriation of
a hundred thousand dollars to be given to Doctor Morton in return for the
free use of etherization by the surgeons of the army and navy.
A hundred thousand dollars was little enough. The British Government paid
thirty thousand pounds as a gratuity for the discovery of vaccination;
and more recently a poor German student made a much larger sum by the
invention of a drug which has since fallen into disuse. Half a million
would not have been more than Morton deserved, and a hundred thousand
might have been bestowed on Wells.
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